World Series starts tonight: BoSox, LA have common bonds

Tuesday

Oct 23, 2018 at 5:10 AMOct 23, 2018 at 5:59 AM

The Washington Post

BOSTON (TNS)— The past 100 years of Boston Red Sox history can be neatly divided into two distinct if disproportionate segments, with Oct. 18, 2004 - and specifically, a few minutes after midnight, bottom of the ninth inning, nobody out, runner on first - as its point of demarcation. Before that fateful moment, as Dave Roberts took his lead off first base, almost nothing about Boston’s experiences in October baseball had gone right. Since that moment, almost nothing has gone wrong.

You will be hearing plenty about Roberts’s famous, franchise-changing stolen base in Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series over the next few days, as the 2018 World Series gets underway Tuesday night at Fenway Park - because it sits at a unique intersection where the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers meet.

The wave of winning for the Red Sox that began when Roberts swiped second against reliever Mariano Rivera, catcher Jorge Posada and the New York Yankees that fall night - and launched the unlikely comeback from three games down that eventually brought the AL pennant to Boston - has so far produced World Series titles in 2004, 2007 and 2013, or three more than the franchise had won in the previous 86 years.

But for the Red Sox to add a fourth title in this 15-year span, it will have to go through the Dodgers and their cordial manager, who returns this week as a local legend who hasn’t had to buy a drink in New England in 14 years: Dave Roberts.

“Now he comes here and he makes a lot of money signing autographs,” joked Red Sox Manager Alex Cora, a close friend and former teammate of Roberts. “I know he [writes], ‘The greatest stolen base in the history of the game.’ He makes a lot of money in an hour. Probably he’s making money right now.”

After a six-week spring training, a six-month regular season and three weeks of playoff games, baseball has been rewarded with one of the more interesting, eyeball-drawing World Series matchups in recent memory, one that is rich in history - even if these storied franchises haven’t met in the playoffs since 1916, when the Dodgers played in Brooklyn and were known as the Robins, and the best Red Sox pitcher was a young left-hander named Babe Ruth - and story lines.

Many of those story lines revolve around the opposing managers, Cora and Roberts, who were teammates for 2 1/2 years in Los Angeles but missed each other by a year as players in Boston. Among their distinctions in this World Series: It will be the first time in history each manager has played for both teams, and the first in history to feature two non-white managers.

“Competing with each other, and to see our different paths and [how far] we’ve come,” Roberts said, “it’s really exceeded all our dreams. For us to play for a world championship - West Coast/East Coast, Dodgers/Red Sox - I just can’t see it getting any better.”

But if this is a Fox Sports executive’s dream - two coastal, major-market franchises with rich histories, big-name stars and plentiful story lines - it is also a true baseball fan’s dream, a World Series featuring the two teams that were by almost any measure the best in their respective leagues over 162 games. It begins with Game 1 on Tuesday night, which matches the two most dominant left-handed starters of their generation, the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw and Boston’s Chris Sale, against each other.

The Red Sox won 108 games in the regular season, the most by any team in 17 years, and blew past the 100-win Yankees in the division series and the 103-win Houston Astros in the ALCS, losing just once in each series and going 5-0 on the road. They have the AL’s most valuable player frontrunner in right fielder Mookie Betts (who may get moved to second base for the games at Dodger Stadium, where there will be no designated hitters) and a top Cy Young candidate in Sale.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, won only 92 games in the regular season, but it was good enough for their sixth straight National League West title. Along the way, they led the NL with a run differential of plus-194 and led the majors, per Fangraphs, in offensive wins above replacement (33.0). They had a staggering seven players hit at least 20 homers - or three more than the number of Red Sox who did it - a list that doesn’t even include their two most accomplished hitters: third baseman Justin Turner, who missed the first month and a half of the season with a broken wrist, and shortstop Manny Machado, whom they acquired at the trade deadline from Baltimore.

Though the Dodgers won 16 fewer games than the Red Sox from April to September, their Pythagorean records, based on run differentials, were far closer: 103-59 for Boston, 102-60 for Los Angeles.

Where the pennant winners’ seasons diverge is in the paths they took to get here.

The Red Sox were a year-long juggernaut, posting a major-league-leading 22-9 record in spring training, jumping out to a 17-2 record over the first three weeks of the regular season and flirting all summer with the modern record for wins in a season, 116, held by the 1906 Chicago Cubs and 2001 Seattle Mariners. Though the division-rival Yankees had their best team in nearly a decade, the Red Sox spent all but 25 days this year in first place.

“You start this journey in February in spring training, and all the stuff you have to go through, and then you have to play 162,” Cora said. “And then if you make [the playoffs], now you have two rounds before you make it to the World Series… . The other day I sat down - I was like, ‘Whew. We made it.’ We knew about the division [title] and the record-setting season, but in this town everything starts [with] October.”

The Dodgers, meanwhile, lost 26 of their first 42 games, were in fourth place in the NL West on Memorial Day, were still 4 1/2 games back on Aug. 22 and had to sweep the Giants in San Francisco on the season’s final weekend just to force a Game 163 tiebreaker. Though they beat the Colorado Rockies in the tiebreaker, and breezed past the Atlanta Braves in the division series, they were pushed to the brink by the small-market Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS, ultimately winning in seven games.

“I think our team carries the underdog mind-set, especially the way we started this year,” said Dodgers center fielder/second baseman Chris Taylor. “Ever since then, we’ve had a little chip on the shoulder, and we kind of feed off the doubters.”

There are juicy questions that will be answered over the coming days: How much did Sale’s recent bout with a stomach illness take out of him? Did left-hander David Price, Boston’s Game 2 starter, solve his postseason troubles in his winning effort in Game 5 of the ALCS? Will Machado’s long history of antagonism with the Red Sox, stemming from his Baltimore Orioles days, resurface during the World Series?

“I don’t see anything happening. I really don’t,” Red Sox reliever Matt Barnes, who was suspended four games for throwing at Machado in 2017, told reporters. “But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about it.”

“We’re just going to be trying to play our game,” Machado said of the reception he can expect in Boston. “We play baseball. You’re going to be booed no matter what.”

Few people know how one iconic moment in October can define a career better than Roberts. His stolen base 14 years ago was the turning point in erasing Boston’s tortured postseason history and bringing the franchise’s first World Series title since 1918. Even far from here, rarely does a day go by when someone doesn’t bring it up to him.

“Even flying into Logan [Airport], and just this time of year, the leaves changing,” Roberts said, “and then you drive up to Fenway Park - and it all just kind of comes back to you.”

Though it isn’t nearly as long or as tortured as Boston’s was, Roberts’s Dodgers have their own postseason drought to deal with. Their last World Series title came in 1988, and 11 postseason appearances since then, including the past five years in a row, have failed to bring another. A year ago, they pushed the Astros to a seventh game in the World Series but lost.

Is this the year the Dodgers finally win it all again? If so, they may someday revere Dave Roberts in L.A. just as much as they do in Boston.

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